


Heaven's Height Is Wide

by paperiuni



Category: Chì bì | Red Cliff (2008)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Drama, F/M, Friendship/Love, Historical References, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, Period-Typical Sexual Mores
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 03:29:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2797925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The siege of Red Cliff will be forever remembered. Some of its stories--the quiet, private, cherished ones--will be recorded in no history book.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heaven's Height Is Wide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Carmilla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmilla/gifts).



> I mainly stuck to movie canon, and picked and chose a few morsels of book canon that helped me flesh out this particular story. I put the list after the story since it might be slightly spoilery for the fic.
> 
> I wish you a merry Yuletide, dear recipient! Thank you so, so much for requesting this tiny beloved fandom of mine. It seems we love a lot of the same things about the movie, so I hope you enjoy this story.

On the first night at Red Cliff, sleeping in the eastern corner of the guesthouse, Zhuge Liang dreamed an old dream.

The Southland of his youth had long since become hazy and changeable in his memory, like an image the wind swept across bending tassels of wheat. That place and time lingered under his waking mind to now and then well forth when his thoughts were quieted by sleep. He could recall the house of his uncle: the orchards heavy with peach and orange, the ripe, living smell of a plowed field, the women singing to keep up their spirits as they harvested mulberry leaves for the ever-hungry silkworms.

In his dream he walked the rooms and porches of a different house: open and airy and well lived in, with the marks of love and prosperity in its sanded floors and painted screens.

He slid aside a door and looked out across undulating hills whose shapes he could almost recognise. They were cloven through by the forking paths of a great river. The water shone blue, but as he watched, its colour deepened to purple, then to red. The hills were black with nightfall.

Zhuge Liang woke to a clatter in another part of the guesthouse, muffled to stillness before he could even rise.

The keep was built in a narrow, defensible crack between the sandstone cliffs. But for the nighttime noises of the troops, everything lay quiescent as he went up to the battlements. A breeze tugged at the sleeves of his robe.

The river did not seem the same from this angle: a wide, flat expanse of water. Even away from the torchlight, he couldn't see the far bank. Milky clouds scuttled past, hiding the moon. Yet he knew the river had been the same. He could trace its shape from a map and try to pin the fraying image from his dream onto reality.

Fire or blood from the north had made the water run red. One didn't need be a sage to guess where his mind had wandered, untethered by wakefulness.

They faced a formidable foe, but the alliance was holding fast for the time being. Coming to the south had perhaps been a gamble, but one that had paid off.

He climbed down, slowed by his own thoughts, and went to the kitchen to find water for tea. No more sleep would come to him tonight.

# # #

In the misty hour before daybreak Xiao Qiao paused in her chores. The smoke of cooking fires rose above the fog eddying on the river, a reminder of the threat amassed to the north.

She'd heard the rumours. They fluttered around her like a flock of hens after tossed seeds. It was whispered on wicked tongues that it was not the will of Heaven that had brought Cao Cao to lay siege to the Southland, but a far more base imperative. Like her husband, she preferred not to cloister herself in the house or behind her father's distinguished name. She worked daily beside her women. She lingered in the stables among her well-loved horses. That exposed her, on occasion, to sidelong glances and cut-off conversations.

What could she do but square her shoulders and go past? Her honour was unchipped, and she could scarcely let idle talk notch it.

The alliance had wrought hope even as it had brought danger. She must try and keep that foremost in her mind. She'd been ready to leave the keep and the house if Zhou Yu judged it best and flee farther to the south where the fighting might not reach. He'd wanted her to stay.

He had a great deal of trust in the alliance. She knew it was not blind faith, but cool and calculated confidence. He knew the necessity of war as well as its cost--as well as anyone could measure that cost. So did Lord Liu and his generals, veterans of wars older than Xiao Qiao herself.

Between directing the cooking of the morning meal and laying out her loom for weaving, she wondered if the same could be said for Lord Liu's chief strategist, unassuming and keen as a knife-tip. She couldn't shed the image of him in Luoyue's stall, helping her favourite horse in a troublesome foaling. How did someone go from pulling a fragile life into the world to planning an engagement that would wound, cripple or kill uncounted men?

The same way that Zhou Yu went from her husband, laughing against the curve of her throat after lovemaking, to the general under his lord's banner, directing men to fight or die. The bamboo bent low in the high wind and stood tall in calm weather. A man could wear many roles and bear many burdens. Or a woman could, she thought.

She had yearned for peace and war had come. Zhou Yu relied on her presence, and in her heart she could not rue it. Too often she'd said her goodbyes when he departed on a campaign. So it was and so it would be, the rice and salt of a woman's life, but she would rather lend her strength where it might make a difference.

# # #

The forecourt of the keep was an apparent confusion of milling horses and men. Patchy thickets of spears sprouted where the infantry lined up, and Sun Shangxiang was about to lead her scouting force out the gate, mounts whinnying and riders calling out to their comrades. The princess was not yet astride, but conversing with Zhuge Liang on some final point of advice. Finally her clear command overcame the noise. The scouts thundered off and the glut of troops lessened that much. Zhuge Liang, standing out in his pale garb among the brown and grey of the soldiers, turned towards the keep proper.

Zhou Yu turned back to checking his saddle straps. Ten stablehands would have stood ready to handle the task, but he preferred to prepare his own gear. To any over-curious ears he explained it as a sentimental holdover from the days when he'd had a humbler rank and no choice in the matter.

It was rather a means of concentrating. He appeared to need that today. He'd been watching Sun Shangxiang depart--it was her first formal command. Too much attention would be an insult to her skill; too little would have chafed at his care and regard for her. And, besides his young captain, he had been watching Zhuge Liang.

When he'd told Xiao Qiao that he believed Zhuge Liang had come in search and in need of friends, he had omitted much. She might have intuited part of it; in truth he was still measuring its full depth. He'd sensed it with his hands upon the qin, playing with Zhuge Liang. Their music had flown together like twin spouts of water into a single bowl.

That same sentiment intruded again. The plan was good and the men steadfast, their chances of victory so solid no strategist of antiquity could have found fault with them. Zhou Yu would have ridden off with greater equilibrium if he could have shaken the sense that his thoughts, his plans, lay in the air as unseen threads that fastened to those of Zhuge Liang's. It would have taken no effort to give in to the flux and flow of understanding between them.

Which was, perhaps, why a part of him bucked at the very idea. He'd known good, long friendships, the trust between sworn brothers and the slowly built love of spouses that lay as the earth under all the layers of his life. Zhuge Liang was neither his brother nor his lover, and sworn to a different lord. This kinship that flashed like lightning could destroy as much as it illuminated.

In spite of all that he struggled to look away.

# # #

Sun Shangxiang's tread had faded down the stairs. The pigeons, his own and those of the keep, dozed in their roosts. Now and then one fluttered across the aviary to land on a more agreeable perch. Zhuge Liang contemplated a return to the festivities downstairs, when another footfall sounded in the doorway.

"Oh," Xiao Qiao said, as he turned across the sphere of lantern light. "Mr. Zhuge. I thought I might find Shangxiang here."

"She was here a moment ago," he said, "though you may wish to hurry if you want to catch her." He had, after all, suggested that Sun Shangxiang leave before the break of day. Crossing the river under cover of night was the most prudent course. While it was often good to begin a dangerous venture on a bold note, the heroics she'd gone seeking were of the clandestine sort.

"What do you mean?" Xiao Qiao stepped closer. Beneath her pleasant smile, a keener expression kindled. "Where would she go, this time of night?"

He glanced towards the river, which reflected the torchlight of the war camp on the far shore. "The princess favours this place?"

"Sometimes. Some things are easier to tell to those who you can be sure will keep a secret. Pigeons, horses."

"I should thank you for housing my birds." The aviary was partitioned with a rattan screen to make a space for the small flock he'd brought with him.

"We've housed your mounts and your men." She rested one hand on the railing, tracking the path of his glance. "Surely the birds are due the same care."

It came to him that Xiao Qiao had gone along with his change of topic, but had not missed that it'd been a diversion. Sun Shangxiang was one more valuable asset for this vastly outnumbered alliance. She was eager to prove herself, and any war leader worthy of the name should know how to best deploy his assets.

She was also, he was coming to understand, dear to Xiao Qiao.

"She's capable of far more than she's been given to do." He let the fan in his hand flick against his forearm. "If her brother can't see this, surely your husband does, my lady."

The beads woven into Xiao Qiao's hair rattled as she pulled herself straighter. "You are not wrong."

"On which account?"

She mulled that over. "Any of them. The world is hard on any woman, but at least she's chosen her own hardship. I do understand that."

Sun Shangxiang opened readily to be read: she made little effort to conceal her nature. She wore it as a challenge to any who might question her. Xiao Qiao was folded shut as immaculately as her hair was arrayed.

"If it eases your mind," he said, "I believe her equal to the task. If she succeeds, we'll gain a great deal." Right now, every grain of rice they could pile on the scales in their favour, counted.

After a long silence, Xiao Qiao nodded. "We must all play our parts."

Zhuge Liang met her gaze when she said, "You may have done a wise thing. Still, if she comes to harm across the river, I will be very cross with you."

He exhaled, smothering the sound best as he could. There was no threat in her; only a lithe, exquisite woman standing in front of him, erect as a solitary cedar.

"I pray it will not come to that."

"So shall I. Good night then. I must head back."

"Good night, Lady Qiao."

She turned to the stairs, and he to the night beyond the walls, and they parted.

# # #

Zhou Yu liked to have his morning practice in private. In times of peace, a secluded corner of the training yard could be found, or he might ride into the woods for an hour or two and spar against his shadow on a forest glen. With the keep thronged with troops, he was left with the garden behind the house.

This morning that had turned out to be just as well. When Zhuge Liang was led in by a servant, apologised for his intrusion, and mildly told Zhou Yu that Sun Shangxiang had gone to spy on the enemy, Zhou Yu could let displeasure darken his countenance without concern for who else might be watching.

"Who thought of this?" They had withdrawn onto the porch. He kept his mouth a flat, controlled line. "You or the princess?"

"Does it matter, Viceroy?" Zhuge Liang's face was vexingly unreadable. "She's gone. I can advise her to return, but slipping in another spy will be more trouble. Lady Sun is a rather ideal agent. She knows the land and the river, and Cao Cao has recruited plenty of Southland troops. Her way of speaking will sound natural."

This man had sent the sister of Zhou Yu's oath-brother into unspeakable danger, and now he had the gall to try and sway him with--with things Zhou Yu full well knew to be true. He pressed two fingers down between his brows.

"You did not tell Lord Sun about this?"

"If you see a need, you can do so." Zhuge Liang canted his chin. "I've told you as a courtesy. It seemed polite, considering she could be said to be under your command."

"Polite indeed." Zhou Yu's glare had a way of wilting most men. Zhuge Liang offered him no such satisfaction. "If she was under my command, it was not your decision to make."

"Would you have let her go?"

The willow leaves drifted back and forth in the breeze. Behind them the plum trees were speckled with pale flowers against their rich green foliage. In this one corner of the grounds, one might have forgotten the enemy fleet loomed so near.

"Sun Ce was my sworn brother." Zhou Yu let free the pinion of his gaze, more for his own comfort. "Shangxiang is his sister."

This would not be news to Zhuge Liang. Zhou Yu had loved the young lord of Wu, ridden with him to the hunt and to battle, married the sister of his bride. The sword Sun Quan had given to him as an emblem of command had once hung from Sun Ce's saddle.

"I've intruded," Zhuge Liang said in a different timbre.

 _You have, and more than you know._ Zhou Yu felt heavy, as if the limbs loosened by his sword forms were worn by a day's fighting instead. This was not a time for remembrance, and he had carried this particular loss for years. There was little reason for it to wax within him.

"I do not doubt her skill," he said at last. He did, he could admit to himself, wish that Sun Shangxiang had spoken to him before leaving. "I do wonder as to your judgment, Chief Strategist."

It was a flagrant breach of manners, and Zhuge Liang's brows knit, a quick, marrow-deep flash of affront. He at least had the grace to avert his eyes. "That bodes ill for our plans."

"This was no plan of mine," Zhou Yu bit out. "I'd meant to let her ride with the cavalry, her and her maids. You're right. We can't waste their talent with the odds so stacked against us. But she is my _family_ , and the family of my liege lord."

It was out in the open, the truth he never should have had to articulate. How easy it had seemed to braid his skills at warfare into those of Zhuge Liang; how easy to be fascinated by his flame-bright mind, so different from Zhou Yu's own wit and intellect. Part of his ire should have fallen on Sun Shangxiang: she'd chosen to leave and let Zhuge Liang be her messenger. Perhaps she'd feared Zhou Yu would stop her.

Zhuge Liang made no gesture, but he stood taut underneath the glassy facade of calm he always wore.

"And you," Zhou Yu said, the air rasping in his throat, "should know that the price of our success or failure is counted in lives."

He went down the porch with stiff, rattling steps, his oath-brother's blade gripped in his white-knuckled fist.

# # #

"You're brooding," Xiao Qiao said from the door of their sleeping quarters. Night had come and turned the winter sky deep and distant. She went around the room and latched the shutters.

"No, my dear." Zhou Yu had his sword--Sun Ce's sword--in his lap. The cloth he'd been cleaning it with had fallen by his foot. "Only thinking."

"I know the difference." She knelt behind him and wound her arms around his neck. "The door is shut. You may leave the general's banner on the other side."

"With your kind permission?"

His wife, the most long-suffering of women, huffed in his ear. "If you carry on for much longer, I'll have to seek my bed alone."

He laced his fingers through hers in a covert entreaty for her patience. Had he been wise he would have followed her to sleep. His thoughts tarried among memories that were sprouting up like weeds through ancient stonework.

He had been thinking of Sun Ce, in unguarded moments, in sliver and shrapnel of memory.

"My brother has been on my mind," he said. "It's the campaign. Cao Cao comes for what we hold most dear. I would that he were here on our side."

So it went with the fallen. Death swept its white sleeves across the life of a loved one, and some part of you was unravelled, to always strain towards those who were gone.

"You are not alone." Her fingers lingered on the nape of his neck.

"Never." He murmured the word against her palm. Eight years ago, her father had wed his two daughters to the young lord of the Sun family and to his gallant captain. Zhou Yu had known it to be a fitting match, though his desire had been divided. A man must marry, and he might sate his heart where he chose as long as he fulfilled his duties to his family line.

That had been then. He closed his eyes and leaned into the warmth of the woman he loved above all others in the world.

"I don't only mean that I am here," she said. "You've united them all."

"Or Zhuge Liang has," Zhou Yu said, and in that name also named the destination where his thoughts seemed to run.

He thought of Sun Ce in part because his lost oath-brother had made the same unrest wake in him as Zhuge Liang did. He was an older man now, tempered by sense and suffering. Still, he knew the ill-timed fascination that stirred and swelled when he looked at Zhuge Liang.

"Liu Bei is a known element," he continued, trying to thwart himself from that mire of musings. "His strategist might as well have been blown in by the wind."

"Then it must be a favourable wind." Xiao Qiao slipped away and began unravelling her hair. "You worry, but he wants the same thing as you do. To win this war."

Zhou Yu's sigh became a chuckle that melted some of the weight from his shoulders. Upon meeting Zhuge Liang, he had felt something break and something begin. War itself never changed, but never before had he planned an engagement together with such a man.

He finished wiping the sword and returned it to its scabbard, then laid it on the rack. Xiao Qiao was snuffing the candles, leaving only one or two caged in bronze lanterns.

"If you seek your bed, my dear," he said, "would you still care for company?"

She came to him. He gathered her close, she kissed him with sweetness and with whimsy, and they let rest wait for a while longer for both of them.

# # #

Past the evening meal the keep began to settle. Such a mass of people would never stop entirely. Watches changed and scouts arrived and left at all hours. The taut, apprehensive activity of the day was exchanged for a skittish attempt at quiet.

Zhuge Liang collected several things from his supplies of medicine, requested a missing herb from the camp physicians, and made his way to the main house. He was let in without question, as he'd expected. Zhou Yu would not have exacerbated the situation by making their dispute public. Thus no servant had been instructed to turn him away.

He entered the sitting room where they had made music together, and reflected on the irony that he'd come to the same place to make amends. This would be a delicate conversation, even if he'd been able--or willing--to approach it head-on. For all his intricacies of thought Zhou Yu was a sincere, straightforward man. Zhuge Liang might have to yield in the face of his frankness.

Zhou Yu did not look up from his writing. He sat erect, his right sleeve pinned back: his left hand rested lax on the table. "You again."

"Viceroy. I came to offer my assistance, if you'll have it."

"I had the impression we were done for the day."

"What we do around the war table is no assistance." He kept his voice light and low. "If I may presume, your shoulder still pains you."

Zhou Yu scoffed. "My lord does not have the fortune of having Hua Tuo in his court. I must make do with the care of doctors who are merely competent."

"I doubt even Hua Tuo could cure an arrow wound in three days." Carrying on his presumption, Zhuge Liang laid his supplies on the table and unknotted the cloth he had wrapped them in. "Your doctors are busy with the wounded, as are ours. Your injury matters rather more than that of a simple footsoldier."

At last Zhou Yu glanced at him, his eyes dark and wary. It was strange to see that doubt so plain in his usually stoic gaze.

"Very well," he said. "Is this one more thing you trifle in?"

Zhuge Liang made a sound that was not a laugh. "One doesn't trifle with the healing arts. I try not to make myself an exception to that."

While he spoke, he set aside the salvia, to be brewed into a tisane to relieve pain and keep the blood flowing well. Zhou Yu hid his hurt, but he wasn't using his left hand to hold his sleeve as he wrote.

Zhuge Liang wondered, was he searching for weakness as he looked at Zhou Yu? Some angle or exploit, as if Zhou Yu--or his stony mood--were a pass to be breached or a hill to be conquered? The decision that had sparked their disagreement had been Zhuge Liang's own.

He waited a moment for another cutting remark. It never came. Zhou Yu disrobed enough for Zhuge Liang to examine the injury. To his satisfaction, there was no trace of infection. He pressed a fresh poultice onto the open wound. All the while Zhou Yu watched him, without conceit, for the scrutiny was clear in his countenance. He found himself measuring his breaths as he worked: a simple means of keeping himself centered.

Zhou Yu tugged his sleeve back into place with a gingerly motion. "Thank you."

Zhuge Liang let his hand remain on the knot of the dressing for a needless heartbeat, sensed the slow breath that Zhou Yu drew. "It is no trouble."

# # #

Mere days later, Sun Shangxiang sent word of disease in Cao Cao's camp. Zhou Yu even distantly rued the situation of their enemy. Adding to the danger of illness that sprang up in any great gathering of people, let alone a war camp, the northerners were not used to the warm, humid winters of Wu.

Then the rafts heaped with bodies landed on the south bank.

Not only did Cao Cao have the gall to use his dead men as a weapon of war, he had the numbers. If he could spread the typhoid fever among their far scarcer soldiers, the blow dealt would be that much more grievous.

They built pyres for the fallen sent from the opposite shore and lit lanterns to ease their passing. When Xiao Qiao, shaking with tears after the burning of the pyres, tied a cloth over her face and went to the sick-tents the next morning, Zhou Yu only held her a moment and then let her go. He had been selfish. If she was near, he could see to her protection himself. That had not been why he'd asked her to stay.

He'd asked her to stay, and now she would face whatever this war brought to their threshold.

And, it gradually dawned on him, so would Zhuge Liang. Zhou Yu had counted Sun Quan and Sun Shangxiang among the young souls of this campaign, one reluctant, the other too eager. But Liu Bei's brilliant, capricious strategist, who had helped his lord turn the tide on a decade of setbacks, had stood still under the rising lanterns, tense as a bow at full draw.

Zhuge Liang would likely have dismissed that glimpse of horror as a regrettable lapse in his control. To Zhou Yu, it had spelled a truth.

He had been mistaken.

The next day, the stream of those falling ill had not been stemmed. They raised new tents and sent out more scouts to harvest cassia leaves for the ailing. Zhou Yu listened to the dark reports of his camp physicians. On the other side of the river, Cao Cao's fleets filled the wide cove.

The doctors and their assistants, Zhuge Liang with his timely knowledge of this, one further, subject, and Xiao Qiao and the bravest of her women worked among the sick, trying to succour them best as they could. With their limited stores of medicine, most patients depended on their own strength and hardiness to overcome the fever. That would take time. Time and provisions which they did not have.

Zhou Yu left the sick-tents to find Liu Bei. A word was needed away from prying ears.

# # #

_Some day you will understand me._

That floated in the sun-sieved air like the thick dust wreathing the road, settling slowly. On foot and on horseback, the hale bracing the ill, Lord Liu's forces set out for the west.

Zhuge Liang was cognisant of movement behind him. The bemused crowd that had gathered, dispersed at a word from Zhou Yu. It was an underhanded kindness, to let Zhuge Liang recover. That was both soothing and scathing. He had managed glibness when Zhou Yu had addressed him, _Then we are all mad._

Three times Liu Bei had sought him in the tranquillity of Sleeping Dragon Ridge. Three times before he'd left his fields and his writings and ridden out into the teetering empire.

Without the departing troops their numbers dwindled beyond endurance. That didn't seem to sink in his mind, like a thrown stone skimming across the surface of a pond.

He thought of his study, where the breeze ruffled his scattered papers and the long afternoon shadows fell gentle. The man at his door, careworn and noble and no longer young, had bowed to him and asked for his wisdom. Zhuge Liang remembered the moment more than the exact words spoken.

It had been an honour, a challenge and a fulfillment. To leave his scrolls, to leave his studies, and bring his knowledge and his skill into the world.

 _And what is this, my lord?_ Which was foremost, the duty to his liege or the keeping of his word?

He looked back at what was left of his ragged, defiant alliance. Most of them had gone: to gauge their options, to tend to the sick, to take count of men and weapons and stores that had abruptly been cut by half. Zhou Yu lingered, a few respectful or calculated paces behind him. He nodded once and then went after his generals.

The nameless thing that lay between them seemed to twist and tighten. Zhuge Liang closed his fingers as if he could pin it into the palm of his hand, out of the dusty, golden air.

# # #

Xiao Qiao woke from a turbulent dream to find midnight draped heavy over the house. The braziers shone with dark red heat in the corners, but gave off only a dim illumination. Under the covers, she lay still, her hand laid on her belly, her face turned halfway into Zhou Yu's shoulder.

He shifted, as if not yet fully free of his own slumber.

"Sleep," she said, but the word only stirred him the rest of the way.

"I haven't for a while. You were tossing and turning." His hand fell on top of hers on her stomach, a twinned weight.

"The river is wide. Now I wish it were a sea, full of dragons and storming waves."

"That might make us safer," said her husband, "if we could tame those dragons."

Her chuckle was a brittle wisp breathed into his skin. "Sleep now. I'll look in on Luoyue."

Accepting her pretext, he tugged her head down to kiss her, then fell back into the bed with a deep outlet of breath as she rose. The twists of her mind should not keep him from rest.

The night was musty and full of the scents and noises of shore and water, the horse and her foal as solid shadows in the tiny pasture behind the stables. Luoyue trundled up to the fence at Xiao Qiao's call and blew warm, dozing wafts into her shoulder. The dew-laden grass soaked the hem of her outer robe.

A lantern moved on the guesthouse porch. It threw the filmy shadow of its bearer onto the door screen and danced it down the steps at his approach.

"How is the foal, Lady Qiao?" Zhuge Liang had wrapped his hair in unadorned cloth, but appeared otherwise recently risen. To her small surprise and amusement, he was barefoot.

"She eats well." Xiao Qiao turned her attention from the mare to let her return to Mengmeng. "Should I now ask how your plans are, Chief Strategist?"

 _If we could tame those dragons._ Xiao Qiao had no military mind, but she understood what part Zhuge Liang played in all their safety. Among the Taoist scholars he was known as Master Sleeping Dragon, although Lord Liu had sought his service for a more worldly purpose. The name was a quaint coincidence; the late hour and her simmering thoughts worked to infuse it with significance.

"My plans will hatch in due course," he said.

"Then you have not risen after midnight to tend to them?" Teasing a guest was hardly good manners. Then again, Zhuge Liang was nowhere near as mild or humble as he was at pains to suggest.

The tiger and the dragon were always circling one another, offering challenge, seeking mastery. The fable seemed to thread close to the warp and weft of reality.

"Simple sleeplessness, I fear," Zhuge Liang answered. "If I wait a little, the moon might come out to keep me company."

"I have a tea for when I can't sleep." There would be a banked fire in the kitchen.

"That would be a kindness, my lady."

Thus she heated water on the stove, stoking the fire until it brought her pot to a fine boil, and made the tea on the back porch. Zhuge Liang hung his lantern on an empty hook and tried to spy the elusive moon amidst the ragged clouds.

"Chang'e is flighty tonight." He nodded his thanks and took the offered cup from her.

"The moon's waxing. She might be impatient for her husband's visit." Xiao Qiao poured for herself. Maybe the balmy herbs of the blend could soothe her, too.

"That's the Southland story, no?" He studied his cup, wreathed in delicate steam. "North of the Yangtze they tell it differently. Chang'e eats the pill of immortality because her husband has grown wicked and must not have it. Then she flees from Hou Yi to the moon. They never meet again."

He bowed slightly over his cup, and Xiao Qiao saw him again as he'd been in Luoyue's stall, as he'd been playing the qin with Zhou Yu. It took silence and aloneness to afford even a glimpse of this Zhuge Liang; she knew it was that glimpse that burned in Zhou Yu's mind.

In the first year of her marriage Xiao Qiao had understood that she had no sole claim to her husband's affections. Then Sun Ce had died on an assassin's blade. Zhou Yu had grieved, as had her sister, and her own understanding had widened, bitter at first and tender later, like a remedy that at last takes away the pain. Love was neither uniform nor finite, and comfort could pave the way for love to linger.

That was one truth. As for the truth on Zhuge Liang, it might yet come to her.

"My aunt told me the tale the Southland way." He'd interpreted her silence as cue to continue. "I'm afraid I've forgotten."

Xiao Qiao smiled, glanced at his face, at his incongruously bare feet, folded under his knees. "I could tell it to you. My nieces ask for it often enough."

"I will do my best to be an attentive audience."

The teacup warm in her hand, she told him the story of Chang'e, the goddess of the moon, and her husband, Hou Yi the celestial archer, who resided in the sun, and of their meeting every month when the moon was at its clearest and brightest, as it was told in the South.

# # #

The next evening Zhuge Liang and Lu Su sailed twenty straw-covered vessels into the undulating fog on the Yangtze. The boats had been prepared with great haste as soon as it was dark.

Xiao Qiao was at her loom, her hands and her mind fallen into the calming pattern of the work, when Zhou Yu called for her. She rubbed at her eyes, drifting with vivid afterimages of the candles. She was scarcely at the door when he came in. Well, she thought, if he was in the women's quarters rather than sending a maid to fetch her, it was important.

"We have a visitor," he said. "An old friend."

"This must be more than a courtesy call."

He smiled with the barest nudge of his mouth. "He came from Cao Cao's camp."

An offer of terms, then. For a fragile beat she wanted to beg him to take them. _Let them come_ , muttered her heart. _Let them come if it means no more fighting. No more dying._

The previous night climbed into her memory, the heat of her tea and the smell of wet grass below the back porch.

The present crystallised around her again. "Then we _must_ offer every courtesy," she said to Zhou Yu."The soldiers have eaten most of the house stores, too, but I'll see what I can do."

"I must borrow your brush and ink." He stopped, as if needing to focus. "Bring the best wine you have left."

She could feel the shiver of possibility in him: as bleak as it seemed that Cao Cao had sent an envoy to demand their surrender, Zhou Yu had no such plan. Whatever plan he _had_ was taking shape even as they spoke.

"And," she ventured, "make sure yours is not as strong as that of our guest?"

Zhou Yu laughed. It was not a merry sound, but there was something warm and aching in it. "I will need you tonight."

Xiao Qiao touched his arm, set her loom to rights, and left him to write a meticulously worded note with her brush.

# # #

"May we speak?" Zhou Yu put it as a question. Zhuge Liang wondered if he would have heeded a demand.

Their archers' quivers rattled with a hundred thousand arrows. The two generals whom Cao Cao had relied on to conduct his naval offensive were dead. Every messenger boy ran his errands with a little more spring in his step, and the shouts and clatters from the training yard seemed more vigorous than the day before.

"I'm sure I have a moment for you, Viceroy." He could not quite excise the smooth edge of satisfaction from his bearing or his voice. Lord Liu's departure had thrown something in him out of joint that had now found its track again.

Zhou Yu arched an eyebrow. "Would the Chief Strategist drink a cup with me? Only the one, of course. The day is far from done." There was to be another war council yet today.

"If you wish." As they walked out of the forecourt, Zhuge Liang allowed himself a fleeting flight of fancy. How might it be to drink wine with Zhou Yu as it was meant to be drunk, long into the night when morning was dreamily far away? To toast the moon and the clouds, and all the other things the poets cared to drink to, and speak of friendship instead of battle.

They had shared success only yesterday. It was something.

Zhou Yu poured the wine himself, made an apology for its meagre quality. They were weeks into a standoff with the enemy. The better wines had been spent long ago.

Zhuge Liang sipped the wine and told him to think nothing of it. He was, after all, a farmer, not an aristocrat.

"You are more than that," Zhou Yu said. "You pretend otherwise, but you are not truly humble."

Of course he could have taken offence. An accusation of pride was, in the least, a pointed insult. He took another draught of wine instead and was rewarded when Zhou Yu continued.

"Thanks to you, we have a chance at victory again." Zhou Yu's gaze turned musing, but the force of his focus did not diminish. "I misjudged you."

The incipient, airy reply faded from his tongue. "Ah."

"Lord Liu had the greater duty to the people under his care. That is a rule of war. But when he went, you remained here."

 _I don't leave things unfinished._ Zhuge Liang had forged this alliance in the first place. He could have referred to that, or to the truth both of them knew: without him, Sun Quan's remaining army would scarcely have a chance against Cao Cao.

"What do you suppose, Viceroy, that all this praise of my character will do to a man so lacking in humility as I?"

"Sometimes a man of your character has earned the admiration." Zhou Yu narrowed his eyes as if he were looking into a flame.

Zhuge Liang set down his cup. His fingers closed in an effort to still themselves. "Well," he began, "it has been said that to resist admiration is to go against the Way."

"Ah. You're playing the sage today, not the strategist, Master Sleeping Dragon."

"And you, General?" Something prickled his palms. It would've been little effort to sweep away the cups and the jug placed between them. He'd thought of friendship and meant that but not only that.

"I don't wear so many roles as you," Zhou Yu said, low and dry. "There seems to be a man underneath them that I esteem greatly."

If it only could have been as straightforward as between the poets, with their yearning words and shared cups of wine, their sleeping mats spread under the shelter of pines on the mountainside.

"Are you certain?" Zhuge Liang returned that slanted look of appraisal Zhou Yu had given him more than once. All the same, he heard his voice fall. "That he isn't another role I must play?"

"Certain enough," said Zhou Yu, before he lifted aside the half-empty jug with one hand, canted Zhuge Liang's chin with the other, and kissed him.

Zhuge Liang exhaled against the kiss. In the moment it felt simple and sure and sacred, the complexities inherent in it laid to rest. Zhou Yu drew back as he had leaned forward. His eyes were almost shut. That sight, that beat of silence and trust, went deeper into Zhuge Liang's guarded heart than the touch had.

"You said to me," he said at length, "that in the end we'll both serve our own sides." 

"I did."

"Which sides will those be now?" He rose to look out of the window that opened into the garden. He could catch no glimpse of the river. "I only see one, for Yu or for Liang."

More folded into those words than he spoke aloud. If Sun Quan surrendered, Cao Cao would likely let him live. Zhou Yu would meet a harsher fate. Zhuge Liang deadened the mental image before it cut too deep.

A chuckle broke from Zhou Yu. "That would make it easier to come to an understanding."

Zhuge Liang nearly voiced the question, then realised it was unnecessary. They were setting terms of understanding: they'd been setting them since Zhuge Liang had uttered the first carefully perjurious remark about Zhou Yu's formations.

"There are two things," Zhou Yu said. "The first, whether you consider it noteworthy or not, is Xiao Qiao."

A man could cut his sleeve with a favoured male companion as easily as he could bed a concubine. Zhou Yu's caveat should perhaps have surprised him more than it did.

"She is a remarkable woman."

"She regarded you far more kindly than I did from the start." Zhou Yu hummed in his throat. "Still, I must speak to her first. We have an agreement."

"I would expect no less." The garden outside was fragrant of ginseng and plum. Soon the flowering of the trees would be over. "You mentioned another thing."

Zhou Yu came up to him and closed the shutters over the view of the garden, then steered him away from the window with a gesture. His expression had focused, hardened. The peaceful lines of his face were drawn sharp again.

"Liu Bei is camped a day's ride to the southwest. He waits for our signal to return. He... I was not to tell you until the time was right."

# # #

Perhaps he should have been furious.

It'd been, naturally, a well-timed ruse. The typhoid fever had provided a suitable excuse, and the lands south of the river were under Wu rule. With caution, Lord Liu's force could escape the notice of Cao Cao's spies. 

No one had known, Zhou Yu said, save for Lord Liu and himself. Zhuge Liang beheld him and felt as if a riptide were building within himself. The freshly formed clarity of his own desire warred with the knowledge that Zhou Yu had kept this from him.

_Some day you will understand me._

Had he not been named the strategist of Lord Liu's forces? Did his generals not heed Zhuge Liang's counsel? Had he not broken a string of setbacks and misfortunes for his lord that stretched back years?

"And if I hadn't stayed?" he asked Zhou Yu. "How could you know I would?" In better charge of himself he would never have spoken that question.

"I didn't," Zhou Yu said, strangely stifled. "Though I admit I hoped."

Zhuge Liang paced a few steps, not quite able to look at Zhou Yu. The best plan was one revealed only when it was already in motion. In Zhou Yu's position, he would have kept the inner circle small, too.

"I did stay. You still did not think it was important for me to know." He stated that, rather than asked. "That it mattered."

"It was not my decision. Lord Liu made the request. I... did him the courtesy of honouring it."

Was that a lie? Zhou Yu had obfuscated his old friend into causing the execution of Cai Mao and Zhang Yun.

"Until you decided the time for courtesy was past." It did not seem real how the conversation had unspooled before, as if they could both nudge the other with the lightest gesture. Now every word tried to fall stiff and clipped from his mouth.

"I don't need to tell you we can't last much longer." Zhou Yu spoke evenly. "We need a plan today. You..." He tarried. "It was time."

Zhuge Liang realised his own place at Red Cliff was indisputable and yet precarious. He had concocted the plan that had solved their materiel shortage. He was not sworn to Sun Quan's service, and in Lord Liu's absence, that left him something of an unknown quantity.

Which he would have, and had, enjoyed in other circumstances, that strange flexibility it afforded him to always be slightly contrary to what people expected.

"It must be time then." He bowed precisely to Zhou Yu. "I will see you at the war table."

There was a thick pressure in his throat as he went swiftly to the door.

# # #

The woven screens hung about the open deck clattered against the columns now and then. The northwesterly wind pressed into the quiet space. Zhuge Liang stood alone by the table, where the geography of river and cove had been mocked up out of sand and clay. The sooty remains of the model ships had been cleared away save for a few dark smudges.

Zhou Yu approached him. Time was slipping away like the craft that had carried Xiao Qiao across the water.

They had a strategy, one spun of fire and wind and a fragile feint, and his wife had gone to the enemy's camp. Now he had to be a steadfast commander before he could be a distraught husband. He had to trust Xiao Qiao.

He set the bowl on the edge of the war table. A few wisps of steam still curled from the cooling broth.

"You didn't come," he said. 

"To say my farewells?" Zhuge Liang had the hawk's wing fan tucked between his fingers. "I don't believe they'll be necessary. And... I am not of Wu."

"You can cure our sick and steal us a hundred thousand arrows, but when it comes to sharing a few dumplings, you step away."

"I must wait for another reunion." Zhuge Liang canted his head away. Zhou Yu heard the terrible tension in his voice and was powerless to loosen it, because neither of them could err from their path. The war council, the desperate gambit of the fire ships, the disappearance of Xiao Qiao had all descended upon them. He did not even know if Zhuge Liang's grievance was his to placate.

"If Heaven is kind, you'll have it soon," Zhou Yu said. "We have a common cause. That earns you a place among us."

He offered Zhuge Liang the bowl with the white, barely steaming dumplings. A moment passed, but then Zhuge Liang uncurled his hand from his sleeve and accepted it.

Later Zhou Yu left the others to their final preparations and went to his qin. The tune he let flow was wild and skittish like an unbroken horse, giving voice to his own fear. 

At first he barely realised another player had joined in his music. The chords slipped between his harsher ones more sonorant and steadying, and gentled the tune. The qin still spoke of grief, but the sound was seeded with a calm, floating resolve.

Zhou Yu never looked past the screen and the stairs to the player in the other room. He never needed to.

# # #

They had come.

The cavalry slipped from the gusty darkness in groups of a few horses, their banners furled and their tack muffled. The infantry in their cloaks of muted hues, hoods over their helmets, trailed close behind. Zhuge Liang had gone to meet them on the southern bank in the shelter of the cliffs. All had to be done quickly and quietly, between sundown and the beginning of the hour of the ox.

He greeted Lord Liu and his brothers with all due courtesy. The swift shift into battlefield roles spared him anything else. Ferrying the men and horses across would be a taxing business.

But the cavalry line was drawn in time, and the banners snapped like yellow lilies in the wind and then began to droop. Cao Cao's war camp was speckled with fires, visible along the black sweep of the river. Zhuge Liang stood on a slight rise in the ground sloping to the water. He knew where Red Cliff was, but he could see nothing.

Such a host of mounts and soldiers could be marvellously silent for its size. He could hear a man sneeze down the ranks somewhere. Here the only sign of activity on either side of the river were the lights.

Everything stilled. The grass, the troops, the air. This was the one thing, the decisive thing, that he could do. Without sword or spear or bow, he could read the sky and the earth and measure the most opportune moment.

A lone light detached itself from the river and scurried up, a burning lantern slicing the night as it ascended.

The wind swelled behind him.

# # #

The last grey vestiges of dawn had given up the sky when the first ships emerged into view past the guttering, smoking tangles of wreckage filling the river. They were Wu ships, flying tattered banners on the wind of a morning rancid with ash.

Zhuge Liang was among the first to arrive on the shore. The iron-shod gates of the keep were thrust open. Further behind the walls, the physicians were preparing best as they could.

The nearing vessels bore the marks of battle, shorn sails and splintered railings, but still they sailed. Gangplanks were slid out onto the docks and men began spilling out. Those few who had survived unscathed were the first to unboard. Their work would only be starting. Zhuge Liang scoured the sooty, haggard crowd and made himself breathe evenly.

Sun Shangxiang leapt the gangplank and was steadied by Sun Quan when her step staggered. Something lingered about her, something shrouded and speechless that Zhuge Liang let slip past this once. Behind the siblings came others: Zhao Yun, then Lord Liu, flanked by his oath-brothers. Concealed by the bustle on the dock, Zhuge Liang shut his eyes. A sense of forgiveness there, though he was unsure if he meant to beg or grant it. It would come later.

When he looked out again, Zhou Yu was leading Xiao Qiao down to the shore. She walked silent and pale on his arm, poised in a way that sparked recognition in Zhuge Liang. The control in her stance was the only thing holding her up.

They'd count their losses for a time to come. In that moment he watched these people make their way onto solid ground and felt the warmth of gratitude like the brush of a great wing across him.

Zhou Yu left Xiao Qiao with a group of the household women, who encircled their mistress like a shield. She glanced back across the crowd. Zhuge Liang caught that gaze with a nod of his head, not quite knowing what it was he was accepting there.

Work was waiting for him as well. The wounded required ministering. He had to speak to Lord Liu. Then Zhou Yu pushed past a few soldiers to where he stood on the water-washed sand. The wear and tear on every returning soul was cast into acute relief now that he could see Zhou Yu up close: covered in soot and cinder, holding himself with a careful tension that spoke of exhaustion and possibly injury.

What was there to be said? They'd lived through the night.

"Viceroy."

Zhou Yu's voice was hoarse, parched by smoke and shouting alike. "Whatever happens from now on, this night has made you immortal. Do you understand that?"

Emperors rose and emperors fell. So wrote the Grand Historian, and many scholars before him. Those who served the emperors likewise went from dust to gold, from glory to oblivion. On the river, a thousand ships had roared with all-consuming flame.

Morning had still come.

They followed the soldiers up the bank and into the keep, among the other bodies making their way towards shelter and respite. Under the gateway, Zhou Yu parted them from the crowd and led them round a corner to the stairs that went up to the battlement.

Zhuge Liang turned over the words in his mind, then said, "You are safe."

"You worried?" Something ached under the humour in Zhou Yu's tone.

"I had faith in our success," he deflected. In the stairwell the wooden fortification separated them from the returning people. In that multitude their absence would go unheeded for a moment.

"Faith," Zhou Yu repeated. "An interesting sentiment from you." He set his back to the solid wall.

"As much as I'd like to only deal in certainties, life is never so smooth. Least of all when the empire strives to unite or to divide."

Zhou Yu fixed a firm look on some detail of the opposite wall. "I let him live. Cao Cao would've taken my head, then Xiao Qiao, and I let him live."

"Now my lord can go west and rule in peace." Zhuge Liang took a step closer. "Lord Sun's lands are safe, and Cao Cao will have no recourse but to retreat north. Your mercy spared his generals the need for vengeance."

With a thin sigh, Zhou Yu reached out half-blindly and drew him in, fingers heavy in his hair.

"Liang."

What should have been a presumption--the worn sound of his given name--became a comfort instead. He put his hands on either side of Zhou Yu's head. Zhou Yu's heart still rushed, as if his body could not yet yield its state of alertness to the safety of shore and keep.

The night before would leave neither of them. They would shut their eyes, squint at fire and taste smoke. When Zhou Yu gripped his wrist, the strap of his bracer chafed at the skin on its inside. Despite his weariness, he remained the general, clad in armour and with a sword at his hip, and Zhuge Liang felt him tremble.

"We should go back," Zhou Yu murmured.

"Yes," Zhuge Liang said wryly. "Victory is ours, and we are still needed." His hand skimmed Zhou Yu's bruised, smeared cheek. "We'll speak later."

Bit by piece they broke apart and each stood on their own again, the viceroy and the strategist.

# # #

Her hand ached under the bandage. It was a clean pain, not the sear of inflamed flesh, so she shifted her tray of bandages against the crook of her thumb. Lanterns and torches had been lit across the breadth of the sick-tents. The sun must have set hours ago. Xiao Qiao recalled that she'd taken a drink of water and a bowl of rice from a solicitous cook, but not distinctly when.

They were still bringing in the wounded, in an endless litany of horrors. Broken limbs, gouged eyes, bodies punctured by arrows. Others that bore no visible injuries but stared glassy-eyed and unresponsive, led by their comrades as if in a waking dream. Then there were the unnumbered burns and blisters, even among their own soldiers--and she had claimed these men, in some unspoken, indefinable way. Zhou Yu led them into battle, and the night burst with fire. They were staggering home now. Each that rasped out his last breath in the twilight of the tents was as another thorn in her heart.

She knelt down beside the next soldier. The dressing around his calf was rust-red with blood, and she smelled a sickening whiff of infection. She couldn't remember if she'd seen this man before; he slept under a ragged cloak, his own tunic rolled up as a pillow. In slumber, every soot-blackened, too-young face blended into the last or the next one.

She had to fetch a physician, someone who'd be able to decide if anything could be done about the wound rot. Rising, she scanned the others moving between the injured. The nearby torches blurred into orange blotches, reducing the people to shadows and silhouettes.

"Lady Qiao," said one of them.

She looked up at Zhuge Liang's face and thought, _He looks weary_. He must have been up through the night of the attack. There seemed to be no way only a single day had passed since then.

She gestured at the soldier. "His leg is getting worse."

He touched her shoulder with the flats of his fingers. "I'll do what I can. Will you assist me?"

"If I can." She mustered herself and saw him do the same.

She cut away the bandage and spooned a bitter sedative into the soldier's mouth. Zhuge Liang counted the time until the man slumped, senseless more than sleeping, and cut and scooped the dead flesh while Xiao Qiao bit her cheek and wiped away the freely flowing blood. Instead of sewing the wound, he packed it with soft hemp, then dressed it again with her help.

"It must heal from within." He scrubbed his hands with a wet cloth. "It was closed too soon."

"I see." She was aware that her face was white with repressed anguish. Some visceral, solid satisfaction steadied her. This soldier would not die tonight.

"My lady," said Zhuge Liang then. "I am grateful for your efforts. They saved this man. But it's been a long day, and longer for you than most of us."

Xiao Qiao scraped the last of the blood from her good hand and nodded, the weight of all he had said coming to lie on her.

# # #

Every servant of Zhou Yu's household that could lend a hand in the aftermath had been recruited for one purpose or another. Once out of the sick-tents, Zhuge Liang could find no passing maid to take care of her mistress.

"If you will permit me." He held out his arm to Xiao Qiao. She took it with a crosswise glance that seemed too knowing for her tired eyes.

The moon rode above swirling, sheer clouds that sieved its pale glow into a crown of light. They met with a single guard posted on the front porch of the house. At a gesture from Xiao Qiao, the soldier opened the door for them. She leaned lightly on him and he let her, not least because her presence supported his own steps.

Finally she pushed aside a door in the shadowed sitting room they had crossed. These were the sleeping quarters she shared with her husband. A candle burned in a bronze holder, illuminating the hushed room and the occupied bed. Some doctor had had the good sense and the voice of authority to send Zhou Yu to rest. To Zhuge Liang it came as an undiluted relief. With the elation, in crept the awareness that he still had more to do. As long as he was lucid.

"Thank you." Xiao Qiao released his arm. He swayed a notch before he could straighten himself.

"Since you're safely here, I should go."

"Kongming," she said, soft as the clouds before the moon. "Show me your hands."

Caught unawares by his name and by her gentleness, he did. She took one between her half-open palms. There seemed to be a quiver in his fingers against hers. "You need sleep."

"There's much to be done."

"It would be a fine fiction for the troops that the chief strategist never sleeps," she said, and Heaven help him, he almost laughed. "You can hide here if you must. Tonight, no one will make note of it. Stay. Rest."

She went to the bed and her husband, the candle flame swimming briefly with her passage. Like a soldier on the last watch of a dark night, as Zhuge Liang thought before all thought faded from him, he sat beside the door, wrapped his robe around himself, and slid down into sleep.

# # #

Zhou Yu was woken by the noise of the women pounding grain. The hard kernels of millet had to be cracked and boiled, sifted and separated. One of the girls began to sing. Soon other voices mingled into hers over the thumping of the pestles. If he did not rise, he could imagine this to be an ordinary day of peace and stillness, of drills and reports. Xiao Qiao was curled up next to him, her hair still bound, fully dressed and fast asleep. A draft came in from a hastily shuttered window.

He sat up and found Zhuge Liang across the room, leaned back against the wall, equally deep in slumber.

In the clear light of dawn the sight had a surreal quality. All the same, Zhou Yu drew one of the quilts from the bed and went to wrap it around the sleeping man as if that were the only sensible thing to do.

As Zhou Yu tugged the quilt over him, first awareness and then surprise flickered across Zhuge Liang's face. "Mmh. Is it morning?"

"It seems so." Zhou Yu stayed crouched down. "Speak softly, if you please. Xiao Qiao sleeps."

The alarm that lit in Zhuge Liang's eyes was, Zhou Yu mused boyishly, worth the effort of saying that with perfect sobriety. It was gone as quickly as it had come. "Indeed. My apologies. Perhaps today the world will wake and be turned the way it is meant to be."

"Sooner or later someone will come with a formal overture of peace. Lord Sun will want to return to the palace, and I must find him a guard." Zhou Yu felt the twitch of laughter at his lip. "I suppose something to eat would be in order before that happens."

"And a trough to scrub one's face in," Zhuge Liang muttered and swept strands of his hair back from his face.

"Spoken like a soldier."

"It must be the company I keep."

Zhou Yu helped him up, an unthinking gesture easy in the moment, and they went to see if there was enough normalcy in the day that they could find a morning meal.

# # #

A few days after Zhuge Liang had woken up by her bedroom door, Xiao Qiao found him on the battlements of the keep. In the distance, the soldiers were picking at the ruined camp across the river: the last of the fallen and plenty of spoils remained. However, when he looked left or right of the scorched fortifications, the wintertime greens of the hills were vibrant and clear in the crisp air.

Zhuge Liang considered for an eyeblink and greeted her by name.

"I had a word with my husband," she said.

His equilibrium skewed slightly. "There have been many demands on both of you lately."

"True enough." She halted a pace to his left and bent to look over the railing. "This one was a request more than a demand."

"If you intend to mystify me..." He strived for his habitual, light smile, and found most of it. It seemed to get easier as the days crept by from the night of the battle.

"Would you tell me if it were working?" Xiao Qiao's placid countenance had changed as well. He'd heard a few details of her ordeal and had not pressed further. Still, she was neither wary nor tense now.

"Perhaps not. You are equal to the challenge, I think."

There was a fullness to her laugh and a glimmer in her eyes that he could not remember from before. "Very well. I will make it plain. You glance at my husband and your eyes linger."

He'd half expected this. He could have said something about a late night and an exchange on the threshold of her own quarters. His eyes veered over the river and then back to her.

"It's your good fortune that _I_ would also favour you." Leaning in, Xiao Qiao kissed the corner of his mouth. Her lips were cool and gentle. "He never seems to choose the easy path."

 _We have an agreement_ , Zhou Yu had told him blithely. The curved beach beneath them was empty; she'd made sure of that with her furtive look.

He gathered his wits. "My lady. Surely I am as humbled as I am delighted."

"You make light," she said, not disapprovingly. "As do I. But my meaning is genuine, Kongming, if you will take it so." 

He gave her hand a thoughtful squeeze, their fingers entwining and coming apart. "It is said that the root of wisdom is calling things by their right names." He sighed. "A sincere question deserves a sincere answer. Will you wait for mine, if only a little?"

She smiled at him, slight and shining. "A little, then. If you insist."

# # #

That conversation kept intruding on him in the coming days. At length, envoys were sent from the north with a formal offer to negotiate. Zhuge Liang briefly considered refusing to take part, then took part, if only because the truth that fifty thousand men and ten fire ships had conquered a force almost twenty times their number was a useful bargaining point, and he the living reminder of that truth.

In worse and better order, the armies dispersed. Lord Liu began sending his troops westward to lighten the strain of supplying them. Sun Quan's local soldiers grew anxious to return before spring planting. The last of Cao Cao's men were hunted across the riverbanks by the allies.

He spoke with Lord Liu at length. What he did not touch upon were the uses of a chief strategist in a time of peace. Sometimes, when morning poured into the eastern corner of the guesthouse and he opened the shutters, he thought of the light slanting over his own yard at the same clement angle.

It was one such morning. He'd come to the pasture to watch Mengmeng scamper after her mother, all lithe legs and tousled mane. Another set of hooves clapped dully against the grassy ground. Turning, Zhuge Liang saw Zhou Yu lead another horse, a sorrel mare, out of the stables.

"She was cut across the flank in the first attack," Zhou Yu said. "Xiao Qiao was adamant, as she is in these matters."

An injured mount was, more often than not, killed and parcelled out to stretch the provisions. The clear-eyed animal had a ragged scar on her side, sewn shut, the stitches now cut out. Zhuge Liang opened the gate before Zhou Yu could ask, and he let the mare join Luoyue and her foal.

"How is she?" Zhuge Liang ventured. He'd seen little of either Zhou Yu or Xiao Qiao. Zhou Yu had been preoccupied by his soldiers, Xiao Qiao by Sun Shangxiang and her household in equal measure. And Zhuge Liang knew his own causes of preoccupation.

"Glowing," Zhou Yu said with a clear dash of amusement. "She tells me that you owe her an answer, and if she doesn't have it soon, there'll be a rumour spreading among your soldiers that you need no sleep."

"What was the word I used of her? 'Remarkable'?" Zhuge Liang shook his head. "It doesn't seem to cover half of her."

"They say a man shouldn't boast of his wife, so I shall hold my peace." There was a content note to Zhou Yu's words, before it changed to a wry one. "Will she have her reply?"

Time in the world was always constrained: by the seasons, by the elements, by war and strife. By his lord's word he might leave Red Cliff, sooner or later. Time did not yet seem to dim his memory. Zhou Yu stood in the sun before him and around him were reflections of other moments: the warmth of his mouth and the taste of not very good wine, the grip of his fingers in the shelter of the gateway, the laughter in his eyes, the first sight on a bleary morning.

And then Xiao Qiao, making tea in the deep hours of the night and telling an old story in her steady, sweet voice, toiling with him to save a life, kissing him on the battlements as if she had every liberty to do so.

"I imagine the wait has been long enough," he said.

"Tonight then?" Zhou Yu was seldom unreadable to him, if he put his mind to it, but now the pleasant question seemed to shift too many ways at once. "I'll see that the wine is better than last time."

Zhuge Liang nodded. Right then he did not quite trust his voice.

# # #

There was wine, soft in the mouth and stinging in the throat. They did not speak of the battle, or even of the peace that had followed. Zhou Yu did not play his qin, and Zhuge Liang was both wistful and glad for that. He did, however, speak of his early days in the court of Wu, and of the mischief that came easily to clever young noblemen.

When his stories petered out, Xiao Qiao recited the oldest of poems by heart. Over a considered cup of undiluted wine, she recounted the story of the horrible tutor who had made her learn the verses. At the end of it Zhou Yu laughed beside her, low and free, like one laughs at cherished things.

Zhuge Liang caught her gaze. When she halted with a cant of her head in query, he said, "Yes."

"Good," she whispered. Zhou Yu took his hand and drew him in across the small span of floor that separated them.

# # #

Still warm with the lingering heat of arms wound around him in sleep, Zhuge Liang opened the sliding door onto the porch. The morning wafted damp and green to meet him.

The memory of the empire lay in the records. Even now someone was frantically penning the first notes that would solidify into the battle of Red Cliff in the great annals. His name would, inevitably, go down in the hallowed company of ancient warlords and venerable scholars. But nothing would be written of those things that he, himself, would carry with him for the rest of his days.

Low to the west he glimpsed the curve of the setting moon, hung in the horizon among the tender mists that heralded morning. If he went back now, he could dream one last dream yet tonight. 

The past was known. The wise men of antiquity were a constant to steer the learning of later ages.

The future was shrouded. A person walked with their eyes trained on what had been. In that moment, Zhuge Liang thought that he might turn around and the future would spread out at his feet, blue and vast as the river under the dawn.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, the things I stole from book canon/history were: Zhuge Liang's childhood in the Southland, Sun Ce and Zhou Yu being oath-brothers (artistic liberty taken with some details), Xiao Qiao having nieces, Liu Bei visiting Zhuge Liang three times. Zhou Yu's sword having belonged to Sun Ce is all my invention.
> 
> As for the myth of Chang'e and Hou Yi--there are multiple versions, but that one was particular to the southern regions during the Han Dynasty was cut out of whole cloth by me, i.e. in general all mistakes left are mine alone.
> 
> Many thanks to the usual suspects for beta, for endless encouragement when I struggled with style and with Zhuge Liang's voice, and for timely boots in the backside. No one could ask for a better writing circle.


End file.
